Letters to David
Irving on this Website

Unless
correspondents ask us not to, this Website
will post selected letters that it
receives, and invite open
debate.

Brian
Renkof British
Columbia relates, Thursday, May 19, 2005, his
investigation into the origins of the controversial
Franke-Griksch report

A
new Franke-Griksch Report is found

THE
English-language
document is said to have
been located recently (2005) in the Kew archives. A
German original has not been found. No further
information has been disclosed by the "ARCFI"
[Aktion Reinhardt Camps Foundation
International] (see http://www.deathcamps.org/
) or their associates.

Eric M. Lipman of 5310
Riverside Dr. Richmond Virginia 23225 wrote on the
other,
notorious document. Jean-Claude Pressac
claimed that Lipman had discovered it "somewhere in
Bavaria". I have a letter from Lipman before me,
dated January 23, 1991.

This is only an intermediate reply to
your letter of 7th January- I found it
fascinating and shall try to reply to all your
questions in due course. I am 78 yrs. old and
have disposed of most of my Nazi documents to
various institutions, including Yad Vashem,
Jerusalem, The Tauber Institute at Brandeis
University and to the archives of Temple Beth
Ahaba [sp.?] in Richmond. Please do be
patient as I am trying to assist you as best I
can.

I then wrote, sending
photocopies. He didn't remember the document at all
-- hence, the reply above. Called him again, and he
hadn't the foggiest idea. Handwriting comparison
indicates that Lipman did
write on the document with the English-language
heading some time after the war.

Lipman certainly made a "true
copy" of the Umsiedlungsaktion document with
the Engish heading, no question.

I seriously doubt however that a
German original ever existed. Gerald Fleming
[Gerhard
Flehinger], in response to my query
about his assertion that

"one of three carbon copies from Alfred
Franke-Gricksch's report, written on a service
mission through the Generalgouvernement between
14 [sic] and 16 of May 1943, is in
author's possession" (see page 143 of Fleming's
book),

sent me a photocopy of his
document. It was the same typed document without
Lipman's signature.

I also wrote to Ekkehard
Franke-Griksch (the son). He sent a bundle of
documents about his father and wrote that Alfred
Franke-Gricksch had committed treason by
conspiring with the Strassers, was sentenced to
death, and went into exile, but that his friend
Himmler had given
him a new identity (Franke) and eventually made
him an SS officer, training Death's Head Division
recruits in Dachau
1935-39, than later promoting him to the SS
Personell Main Office in January 1943. Ekkehard
also stated that his father may have visited
Auschwitz, but that he would have reported only on
matters concerning the SS personell and their
activities:

"As a consequence of his position in
the SS Personell Office, my father visited the
concentration camps, but this was only out of
concern for the SS men who worked there. It was
out of this that the falsification was
produced".

He did not believe that his
father had written the Auchwitz gassing report
published by Fleming and Pressac. Alfred F-G was
released from British captivity in 1948 and then
mysteriously "lured" into the Soviet zone of Berlin
in 1951. He died in Vorkuta Gulag in 1953. His wife
Liselotte is said to have submitted her husband's
From the Diary of a Fallen SS Leader into
evidence at the Treblinka Trial of 1965, but we
have only Fleming's wild speculation that it was
written to provide a context for the Auschwitz
report.

As Ekkehard wrote, F-G was
concerned with the discontent of the SS personell
stationed in the camps: "Duty in Auschwitz is
frontline duty".

To this day, no original German
report of 1943 has been presented bearing the name
or signature of Alfred Franke-Gricksch, nor Alfred
Franke. If Ekkehard's story is true, any wartime
document should bear the nom de plume "Franke".

The gassing document is a
fabrication, no question. Lipman merely copied what
he had found and signed it.

This new
document could be the original
Franke-Gricksch report, if authentic. It would have
provided a suitable file in which to plant the
fabrication, most importantly providing the dates
May 4 -16 1943 in which to suggest that a gas
chamber report was written, and a suitable context
to present it within, a secret SS officer's report
for his superiors.

It could not have been written
for Maximilian von Herff, [Chef des SS
Personalhauptamtes] who evidently accompanied
him. Whatever is found, remember that
Franke-Gricksch's "Chief" [ von Herff,]
died in British captivity in 1945, but
Franke-Gricksch was released without sentence.

Why? Did Franke-Gricksch make a
deal with the British? This document perfectly fits
into the context of SS discontent, reporting on the
great social, industrial, economic, agricultural
and sanitary achievements they had made possible
through their difficult assignment in the camps. I
am not surprised that it should be located in a
British archive, since both von Herff and
Franke-Gricksch were in British captivity.

Our detractors are already
speculating this is the original "sanitized"
report, and that the Auschwitz gassing report could
have been a secret file-within-the-file, but there
is an open reference to an eventual or possible --
not immediate -- "liquidation", so there would be
nothing to hide if mass liquidations had already
been undertaken.

I also see a blatant
contradiction between an SS officer reporting on
the verified plans for an expansion of the camp for
200,000 inmates (with a commensurate non-homicidal
cremation facility expansion) and an extermination
facility in which 10,000 a day were to be killed
and cremated upon arrival. Here, only one of the
report versions can be correct...